Bill Gamson, sociologist and inventor of games, dies at 87

(NYT) » Bill Gamson, an eminent sociologist who explored the structure of social movements and whose childhood love of games led him to create one that became an inspiration for the fantasy sports industry, died March 23 at his home in Brookline, Mass. He was 87.

The cause was sarcoma, a type of cancer, his son, Joshua Gamson, said.

While a young research associate at Harvard, Bill Gamson indulged his enthusiasm for baseball and his attachment to games by creating what he called the National Baseball Seminar, a simulated game in which each person in his group (originally three) had a budget to draft major leaguers for a team.

The players were measured throughout the season based on batting average, runs batted in, earned run average and wins.

“We felt these statistics reflected productivity, but in truth there wasn’t a tremendous availability of statistics back then,” Gamson told ESPN the Magazine in 2010. “We knew these four would be published in all the papers.”

When he moved to the University of Michigan in 1962, he recruited about 25 people to his game, including Robert Sklar, a history professor. In 1968, Sklar mentioned it to Daniel Okrent, a student he was advising.

A decade later, Okrent invented the more complex Rotisserie League Baseball, which lets its “owners” make in-season trades; it is considered the closest ancestor to today’s billion-dollar fantasy sports industry.